My mum was a wise old bird. ‘Our parents either live too long, or die too soon,’ she told me once. ‘We either go when you still need us, or we become a burden. There’s no middle ground.’ In her case, I lost her far too soon.

Her sudden death at only 59 came like a bolt out of the clear blue sky. My father’s death a decade later, aged just 68, only reinforced the sense I’d been cheated. And yet, much as I loved them both, I’m glad they’re dead.

Don’t get me wrong: I adored my parents. I was heartbroken when they died, and there isn’t a day goes past I don’t think of them, often reaching for the phone before remembering there’s no one left to pick up.

But as I watch my friends and contemporaries - the so-called ‘sandwich generation’ - struggle to balance the need of their ageing parents with those of their children, fighting to hold down jobs and marriages, their finances buckling under the strain, I’ve realised there’s a silver lining to being a 42-year-old orphan.

Tess Stimson, pictured with her parents and younger sister, is glad her mother and father died young

Her mother was 59 when she died in 2001, and her father was 68 when he passed away last year

Last week, I helped my friend Alison pack up her much-loved flat overlooking the river in Putney, South-West London, which she has just sold. She was in tears as we carefully wrapped mementoes gathered over two decades travelling the world as a freelance journalist. But her job, too, has gone now, along with her home.

Yet that’s not why she has had to move. She’s giving up her career and home because her elderly parents are too frail to look after themselves, and Alison, an only child with no family of her own, feels she has no choice but to move home to care for them.

Another friend, Gina, is juggling a full-time job with raising three teenage boys and looking after her widowed mother, who has Alzheimer’s and has just moved into a hospice.

And then there is another friend, Julie. Her parents are still in good health, but with both aged nearly 80, she knows it’s only a matter of time before the wind turns.

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‘So far, I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet,’ she told me recently. ‘Sooner or later, it’s going to catch up with me. I love them both, but there are times I wish they’d pass away peacefully in their sleep, so I don’t have to worry about them any more.’

It’s not that Julie doesn’t care. But at 51, she’s long since confronted the idea of her parents’ mortality, and while she’ll grieve deeply for them when they die, she’s steeled herself for the blow.

What both she and her parents fear is a long, slow decline into illness, disability or senility.

Most of her parents’ conversations these days revolve around worries about their increasing frailty, and how they’ll cope both financially and emotionally. As Julie puts it, it’s as if a sword is hanging over all their heads.

I know how she feels. In my 20s, I lived and worked abroad, and often fretted about something happening to my parents when I was too far away to do anything. Ironically, I’d only just moved back to London following a painful divorce when my mother was taken ill in December 2001.

Mummy and I had always been close, and I told her everything. She was a rock throughout my divorce

I’d spent the preceding weekend in Sussex with them at our old family home along with my two sons, Henry, then seven, and Matt, four.

Mummy and I had stayed up late that Saturday night, nattering over a glass or two of wine. Daddy teased us for our nonstop chatter. ‘You two talk every bloody day on the phone,’ he said. ‘What more can you possibly have to say to each other?’

But Mummy and I had always been close, and I told her everything. She was a rock throughout my divorce, and I drew huge strength from her, as I had all my life. I couldn’t imagine what I’d do without her.

That Sunday night, I kissed her goodbye before heading back to my flat with the boys, my mind already on the working week ahead.

I had no idea it was to be the last time I’d ever kiss her soft cheek, or hear her tell me she loved me, or smile to myself at the familiar exhortation to ‘take care and drive safely’ as she waved me off down the drive.

The next day, my father called to tell me she’d suddenly been taken ill with abdominal pains and was in hospital. ‘No need to come rushing back,’ he told me, unruffled. ‘She doesn’t want to make a fuss. I’m sure she’ll be fine.’

But a sixth sense told me something was seriously wrong. I got straight in the car, but by the time I reached the hospital 90 minutes later, she was already in surgery. Her bowel had perforated, and she’d gone into septic shock. No one could have predicted it or seen it coming.

She never regained consciousness and died six days later. Right up till the moment it happened, I refused to believe she’d die. She was only 59. I wasn’t ready to lose her yet.

My father, then 58, was knocked sideways. They’d been married 40 years; he didn’t know how to function without her.

I had no time to mourn myself; I was too busy trying to hold Daddy together. For six months, I spent almost every minute with him, putting my life on hold. I didn’t begrudge the time, of course. But as he sank into depression, I wondered how much longer I could cope.

'I had no time to mourn myself; I was too busy trying to hold Daddy together'

Then, a year after my mother’s death, he met a wonderful woman who transformed his life and gave him hope again. I didn’t feel jealous or upset that another woman was taking my mother’s place; I was thrilled to see him so happy.

I was also secretly relieved that he had someone else to take care of him; finally, I could take my finger off the pause button and get on with my own life.

Not long afterwards, I moved to America for work, where I met my second husband. Daddy remarried, and retired to New Zealand, which he visited on holiday and fell in love with. I was sorry he was so far away, but we talked often on the phone - ever since Mummy had died, he’d taken over her role as my chief confidant - and I flew out two or three times a year to see him.

Of course, I still worried all the time about being so far away if anything should happen to him, but I’d only been living 30 miles from my mother and still hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye.

It was on one of my trips to New Zealand that Daddy first spotted blood in his urine, in November 2009. Doctors diagnosed a bladder tumour, and at first, they were optimistic, but within six months, we learned it had spread to his lungs and was terminal.

I couldn’t believe it was happening again. We all know our parents will die, it’s the natural order, and yet in our hearts we think it won’t happen to us. Like plane crashes, losing your parents is something that happens to other people. Daddy was determined to wring every moment of pleasure he could out of the days he had left.

Tess with her mother and father, left at her graduation, and right at her wedding

He wrote his bucket list - including taking a helicopter ride to the floor of the Grand Canyon, and going on a cruise around the Galapagos Islands - and completed nearly everything on it. We spent our last Christmas together in 2010, which was both wonderful and poignant and incredibly painful.

I tried to be brave for him, but there was one night when I just curled up in his lap and sobbed my heart out, while he stroked my hair and told me how much he’d always loved me.

He insisted he wanted my last memory of him to be a good one, and refused to let me be at his deathbed. Instead, I visited him for the last time in November 2011, and he waved me off at the airport, smiling the whole time. I cried for the entire flight home, unable to believe I’d never see him again. When he died six weeks later in January 2012, aged just 68, I felt bitterly alone.

'They'd become problems to be dealt with, the kind of burden my mother had always dreaded being'

All my friends still had at least one parent still living, many of them both. But whenever we got together, where once their conversations had revolved around men, and later children, now it was all about their ageing parents: their knee replacements, broken hips, forgetfulness and falls.

They’d become problems to be dealt with, the kind of burden my mother had always dreaded being. Siblings passed responsibility back and forth like a hot potato.

None of them wanted their parents to die, of course, but nor did they seem to get much pleasure from still having them around.

At least I’d escaped all that, I told myself thankfully. My parents were relatively young when they died; ironically, apart from the illnesses that actually killed them, they hadn’t been either frail or ill.

They hadn’t lost their marbles, or become a duty to be endured. I went to see them because I wanted to; I picked up the phone for a gossip because I enjoyed chatting to them. Neither of them had ever become old. I realised then I was the lucky one.

As far as my parents were concerned, their three children were grown up and making their way in the world. They didn’t have to live long enough to see it all unravel

And in some ways they were lucky, too. The world isn’t kind to old people. Apart from a fortunate few, grey heads are ignored, not venerated.

My mother used to worry endlessly how they were going to make their pension stretch. She dreaded an old age of ailments and penury, shivering by a one-bar fire. Well, she never had to deal with any of it.

I’m glad, too, she hasn’t had to see the way my brother and sister’s lives have turned out. She didn’t see my brother’s wife leave him, taking their three small boys with her; or my sister become a grandmother scarcely into her 40s.

Mummy always took their problems to heart, seeing them as a sign of her failure of her as a mother. But when she died, my sister was happily settled with her third husband; Mummy never had to see her divorce yet again, or put her young sons into foster care for good.

Daddy died when my brother’s life was on an upward trajectory; he wasn’t kept awake at night worrying about his financial problems, as I am.

As far as my parents were concerned, their three children were grown up and making their way in the world. They didn’t have to live long enough to see it all unravel.

There are times I’d give everything I own just to have a five-minute conversation with my mother, or a reassuring hug from my father, whose arms were the safest place I have ever known.

But, for their sakes, I’m glad they didn’t have to suffer the indignity of a slow decline into old age. I’m relieved I’ve never had to look into an adored face which failed to recognise me. This Christmas I will miss them, of course, but I no longer feel the hand I’ve been dealt is unfair.

My parents had good lives, and good deaths at the right time for them. As Bette Davis said: ‘Old age ain’t no place for sissies.’